Abstract: Existing studies focus on whether cross-border M&A can improve innovation quality, but lack of attention to how cross-border M&A has differentiated impact on innovation quality. This paper divides cross-border M&A into exploratory M&A and exploitative M&A based on the perspective of exploratory and exploitative learning, divides innovation quality into technology quality and market quality based on technology and market dimension, empirically tests the differentiated effects of two cross-border M&A behaviors on different dimensions of innovation quality, and explores the moderating effects of integration depth and knowledge depth based on knowledge management theory. It is found that exploratory M&A helps to improve technology quality, exploitative M&A helps to improve market quality, and the impact of cross-border M&A on innovation quality depends on the post M&A knowledge management process. Firms with deep integration (high knowledge acquisition degree) and deep field knowledge (strong knowledge exploitation ability) can benefit more from cross-border M&A.